


Grief is the price

by jonasnightingale



Category: The Princess Switch (2018)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27175228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonasnightingale/pseuds/jonasnightingale
Summary: I will die on this hill.**Kevin intro-spective on a life where he has traded his best friend for a lover with her face.
Relationships: Stacy De Novo/Kevin Richards
Comments: 2
Kudos: 15





	Grief is the price

It had changed so quickly, their world. His life had been inside jokes and teasing ribbing over the smell of sugar and cocoa one day, and now this. Now he opens the shop alone, now his mornings start with an empty coffee pot and cold kitchen. He learns to miss her lists, the quiet glue that held their lives together, when they run out of eggs at midday, and when the napkins go unordered, when Book Week comes and a hastily organised store bought costume is the best they can do. 

Margaret brings adventure and spontaneity to their world, but they lose something in the trade. Something he hadn’t expected to feel so keenly. Sometimes when he can’t sleep, that day plays over in his mind, the “but you’re not Stacy” that had spilled unprompted from his lips. He wonders if that was some subconscious warning he should have known to heed. 

He’s happy, with Margaret, with the whimsy that colours their days. But he finds his gaze tracking the photos on the mantel, cataloguing the ease of the family they had been, feeling his mouth tick up at the familiarity of Stacy’s arms around Liv. He misses her, the way she had always completed them, the million ways she’d showed up every day to fill the absences Karen had left. They had been best friends for over a decade, her ghost was everywhere. 

Even the things he’d always razzed her for, he misses. Her intensity, the fire in her eyes, the determination in her spine that day she’d sat Liv down for a frank discussion on gender. Without her plan their future holds no shape, there’s no overarching vision to strive for anymore. He thinks of her when its roster time at the bakery, and when Christmas in July rolls around without her festive meringue. Of course she writes them emails, and FaceTimes Liv on weekends, and he finds himself trying to gauge the honesty of her smile, reading for hesitations in her words. He knows her drunk giggle, the soft curve of her body asleep against his on the couch, the tense of her neck in frustration, the catch in her voice when she tries to push aside her own pain; but through a screen he loses all sense of nuance. Her tells had always been a language he was fluent in, but now he flounders, falls into the trap of reading her facade the way he would Margaret. 

But the weight of their eyes is different, and he finds himself searching Margaret’s gaze for the humour that had lived in Stacy’s. Stacy’s eyes had been a steady factor in his life, he knew the shades of them, their crinkle of laughter when they exchanged jokes over whisks and batters, the quirk of her eyebrow when she held her tongue, the glint when tears threatened to overwhelm her. Now his breath catches as his thumb traces along Margaret’s shoulder. He knows there should be a scar here, a permanent reminder of the lengths Stacy would go for them, a white strike against her flesh from the impact she’d taken saving a five year old Liv from the hood of a car. Yet another debt he could never repay. The memory is newly linked to Margaret casually mentioning mid-flight home that Stacy had only agreed to the whole switch so Liv could join the summer ballet program; his heart seizing 35,000 feet above the Atlantic. 

He’s glad she’s being celebrated, finally given the praise and admiration she deserves. But he thinks about her red-nosed and stuffy in his arms after Paul’s brutal dumping, thinks of her bright-eyed and beaming at the opening of their bakery, and he feels a weight twist in his gut. Maybe they’d never had sparks, but love? Yeah they’d had that in spades. 

Liv’s teachers face them with confusion and he tries to not think about Stacy sitting at parent teacher conferences these past four years, tries to not compare Margarets casual discussions with the blow-by-blow plans Stacy had nutted out when Liv struggled in class. And when Liv’s grades slip, he tries to not read into the way Ms Murphy asks “And changes at home?”

Because for all they’ve gained, the chasm of her absence threatens to sink him. And this time she’s not there to pick up the pieces. She’s not there to sew Liv’s dance costumes and check the date on the groceries and light a fire under his ass, to tell him “We are family and I promise we will get through this… you just gotta get out of bed first”. He stops counting the amount of coffee’s he’s tipped down the sink; muscle memory pouring Stacy’s order before remembering. So much of their lives intwined is instinct he doesn’t even notice the pile up of notebooks until Margaret mentions it, doesn’t think twice about the almond milk going unopened in the fridge door. 

And he worries, sometimes, about the lessons he’s teaching his daughter. About the way she will learn to look at dependability and stability and turn her back, looking for fireworks. He worries that as she ages she’ll conflate these two people, attribute the halloween costumes and piggyback rides captured and framed to Margaret and forget that there was a women with her face before that they built their lives on. He wonders if Liv will remember that ‘A Christmas Prince’ was Stacy’s favourite film, or if it will forever now be tied to that Margaret’s first Christmas with them. He wonders who she will think of when she sees the Belgravian stockings in years to come. It all feels like an erasure somehow. 

**Author's Note:**

> So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.  
> ― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly


End file.
